Mobile devices, such as personal digital assistants and messaging enabled communications devices are rapidly growing in popularity. More features are being incorporated into mobile devices. For example, there are now messaging enabled mobile phones that have display screens and built-in-cameras. Such phones allow images taken by the camera to be displayed on screen, stored on the phone and wirelessly transmitted as digital photos. The use of an integrated camera as an input interface for a mobile communications device has been proposed, whereby image information from the camera is converted to text data which can be used as a phone number, Internet address, or mail text to support calling, Internet connection or mail passing.
Due to the compact size and portability of handheld mobile devices, the range of input interfaces for on-screen navigation is typically more limited for such compact devices than for larger devices such as laptop and desktop computers. Rather than using optical or roller ball mice, touch pads, or joysticks to move an on-screen pointer or cursor, navigation control on handheld devices typically relies on a directional keypad, a stylus, and/or other input devices such as a thumbwheel.
Thus, there is a need for an alternative input interface for on-screen navigation in mobile devices.